Gordon Mack Went From Designing Roller Coasters To The MLB Fancave
By Spike Eskin
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) – Bethlehem's Gordon Mack has a degree in mechanical engineering from Johns Hopkins University, but mechanical engineering is not how he's earning his money right now.
"I thought I wanted to design roller coasters, but I really didn't know that I was getting a degree so I could get paid to watch baseball," Mack told 94WIP's Angelo Cataldi and the WIP Morning Show. Mack isn't a baseball beat writer, he's a dweller of the MLB Fan Cave. He doesn't earn a salary, but he does get a daily stipend for food.
All season long, contestants spend their days and nights in the cave, watching baseball on big screen TVs; a lot of baseball. "We have to watch every single game of the entire Major League Baseball season. Which is 2430 games, and there's nine of us. But there's also an elimination factor to it. Throughout the season we're slowly going to get eliminated off, until one fan remains the ultimate MLB Fan Cave fan at the end of the season to watch the World Series," he said. The eliminations are determined by fan voting at the Fan Cave website..
Mack even quit his job to be part of the Fan Cave. "I felt like this was a once in a lifetime opportunity to watch baseball, hang out with celebrities, players come in," he said. "I'm excited for the Phillies to come in at the end of of the month. So for me it was a no-brainer."
To stand out from the over 22,000 entries that MLB received, Mack sent in a video of himself performing a rap song about the Phillies on one side of a split screen, on the other was video of Mack balancing a chair on his chin.
Generally, watching a baseball game is thought of as a three-hour affair; not for Mack. "I'm in the cave pretty much from first pitch to last out, so pretty much a day could be like 1 o'clock until two a clock for the west coast games, so it's pretty much a 12 hour day, every day," he said.
"We have to watch every single game, when the Phillies are on, I'm not going to lie, my eyes tend to get shifted back toward that game, but in general we have our peripherals looking at the other games that are going on. It's not that hard, there are 16 big screen TV's you're staring at," Mack said.
You can follow Gordon Mack on Twitter @GordonMack.
You can vote for Gordon at the MLB Fan Cave website.
